Data networks are widely used to link various types of network elements, such as personal computers, servers, gateways, network telephones, and so forth. Data networks may include private networks (such as local area networks or wide area networks), and public networks (such as the Internet). Popular forms of communications between network elements across such data networks include electronic mail, file transfer, web browsing, and other exchanges of digital data.
With the increased capacity and reliability of data networks, voice and multimedia communications (including telephone calls, video conferencing, and so forth) over data networks have become possible. Voice and multimedia communications over data networks are unlike voice and multimedia communications in a conventional circuit-switched network such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which provides users with dedicated, end-to-end circuit connections for the duration of each call. Communications over data networks, such as IP (Internet Protocol) networks, are performed using packets or datagrams that are sent in bursts from a source to one or more destination nodes. Voice data, and other forms of multimedia streaming data sent over a data network typically share network bandwidth with conventional non-streaming data (e.g., data associated with electronic mail, file transfer, web access, and other traffic).
Various standards have been proposed for audio and multimedia communications over data networks. One such standard is the H.323 Recommendation from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which describes terminals, equipment and services for multimedia communications over data networks. Another standard for audio and multimedia communications is the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which establishes, maintains, and terminates multimedia sessions over a data network. SIP is part of a multimedia data and control architecture developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
A communications network may include a collection of different types of terminals, such as terminals coupled to packet-based networks (e.g., computers, network telephones, etc.) and terminals coupled to circuit-switched networks (e.g., standard analog or digital telephones). Inter-operation between different types of terminals may be possible, and may be accomplished by use of some type of a gateway, such as a PSTN gateway, which converts between packet-based data and circuit-switched data in a call session.
Although improvements in technology have improved inter-operability between certain different types of devices (such as packet-based telephony devices and circuit-switched telephony devices), a need continues to exist for providing inter-operability among other combinations of devices. For example, a computer system may be coupled to many different types of peripheral devices. One type of computer peripheral device is the Universal Serial Bus (USB) device, which may include a printer, scanner, camera, telephone, keyboard, mouse, joystick, or another type of peripheral device. Although peripheral devices coupled to a computer system may be readily available to a user of the computer system, it may not be available remotely.